Tell Me More with Kelly Corrigan

In order to end the systemic racism that we have, income inequality, the homophobia, I think it all comes down to two things really-- education and civic engagement, and when you put that together, it kind of sounds like democracy.

Corrigan: People have been organizing for change for forever.

Movements for and against war, for and against prohibition, birth control, gay marriage, minimum wage, voting rights, police reform.

The need for equity, which a 5-year-old would just call fairness, is deep and persistent and totally predictable.

Anyone who has raised kids or managed a team knows that whatever you do for one you must do for the others.

Dolores Huerta is one of our country's experts in making things more fair.

The mother of 11 children, the partner of Cesar Chavez, a role model for Gloria Steinem and President Obama, she has much to teach us about how change happens in America, in her case for millions of people doing the invisible, back-breaking, essential work that feeds our country.

I'm Kelly Corrigan, this is "Tell Me More," and here is my conversation with one of the world's most effective living activists-- Dolores Huerta.

Dolores Huerta, welcome to "Tell Me More."

Thank you.

So I've been studying you for a while now, and I see this connection between somebody like Greta Thunberg or AOC or the movements in Me Too or Black Lives Matter or the Women's March.

I think there are a set of things that your life can tell us... Mm-hmm.

about how a successful movement works.

Mm-hmm.

You have to keep a superdeep connection to the people at the heart of the movement.

Mm-hmm.

How do you think about your choices to be close to the people?

When we started to organize farmworkers, we came to the conclusion that the reason that the prior organizing attempts had failed is because organizers would come into an area, they would have these strikes, sometimes people would get killed, and then they would leave, and the farmworkers were stuck with the consequences of their actions, so one of the decisions that we made was, no, we had to be there with the workers and let them know that we weren't going anywhere, that we were gonna stay there with them.

We met with people in their homes family by family, and we did this for 3 years before we ever had that first strike.

It's such grueling work.

Like, nobody would need healthcare benefits and a pension more than a farmworker.

I'm sure I've never worked a day that hard in my life, much less decades.

It would be wonderful if everybody could work-- ha ha--go out there into the fields a couple of days of their life to see how physically taxing it is.

You almost have to be like an athlete to be able to go out there and work in the fields.

I remember when I started organizing that the employers would say, "Oh, we do the public a favor because we hire these degenerates," and as you may know, they weren't even providing bathrooms in the fields for the workers.

These are workers that are picking the food that is going to be put on a truck and go to your supermarket.

I mean, they're feeding the whole country.

The whole country, and yet they didn't even have the basic necessities that they needed like cold drinking water in the hot sun, you know, and of course, the other basic things like rest periods, unemployment insurance, the right to organize.

So they were pretty much at the bottom of the barrel.

Somehow, Robert Kennedy when he was running for president got really interested in the farmworkers.

Mm-hmm.

[Cheering and applause] Want a union they have said, and that voice must be heard.

Corrigan: And then you started to really help his campaign, and you two were side by side the night that he was shot.

I feel like I read somewhere that you had a lot of guilt after that.

Well, I felt very guilty because when I was escorting Senator Kennedy and Ethel, his wife, to the podium we were going through the kitchen, and he stopped, and he went, and he shook hands with everybody, and then I thought to myself, "He shouldn't be doing that.

That is very dangerous for him to do that."

My thanks to all of you, and now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there.

Thank you.

Huerta: And after his speech, somebody pulled out a mic, and I thought, "Oh, my God.

That could have been a bomb," and to think that here it was the candidate running for the presidency, and he had no security.

Right, and obviously, it's post-JFK, post-MLK.

And I--I didn't say anything because I thought, "If I say something, I'm just going to ruin the moment," the moment that he was going to win California and he was gonna be the next president of the United States of America, and I didn't say anything.

Woman: The maitre d' reported that Senator Kennedy had been shot.

Man: He's been shot?

That's right.

Huerta: And so for many, many decades, I felt so guilty for that moment because I didn't speak up.

And when you went to bed that night, did you think, "I can't do this anymore," or, "I can--I'll never stop doing this"?

We knew that when we lost Robert Kennedy we lost a great friend, but the work had to continue, and so we really can't afford to ever have that notion even enter our minds that we're going to quit or that we're going to stop because--I like to quote Cesar Chavez, who always said, "The only time you lose is when you quit."

I know that we've had some big setbacks after the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties, but I think that now there's a new awakening in our country.

Hmm.

And people are seeing-- I think a lot of it has to do with the social media.

People can mobilize very instantly as we've seen with the Black Lives Matter movement, the Me Too movement, the environmental justice movement, and then the other thing, too, is of course teaching science because when we talk about global warming, we talk about women's reproductive rights, you know, a lot of this is science-based, and that has to be definitely stepped up.

Speaking of women's rights, you were once pro life, and now you're pro choice?

Well-- I always think it's so interesting when people change their minds.

I'm a Catholic, and I have 11 children.

Let's just pause there.

Yeah.

Heh!

11.

And then the idea that somehow you should keep having children forever-- heh--and of course, when I met Gloria Steinem, that was the first time that I ever had that idea challenged, and at the same time, I was struggling because I was seeing the visible, again, biases and discrimination against women, and so I had that awakening in my own life to realize that, "Oh, you know, women "can never really go forward unless they have control of their own bodies."

Yeah.

And so you might say I became a convert to reproductive rights, and of course, I owe this to Ellie Smeal and to Gloria Steinem because they're the ones that, you might say, showed me the way.

So that's another thing that a great movement needs is a coalition.

So when you met Gloria Steinem, she started opening your eyes to-- if there were a Venn diagram of all the things you were trying to do for farmers and all the things she was trying to do for women and all the things that other people were trying to do for the environment, that those circles, the overlap was much greater maybe than you had noticed before.

How--how powerful is it to develop a coalition that's broad, that's all moving towards these sort of meta goals of fairness and rights?

Well, it's extremely important, and if movements can work together to make this happen, we can accelerate the process of social justice and fairness.

I think that you might be the world's expert in something that everyone is trying to figure out right now, which is how do we make things more fair?

Oh, I think it's easy.

I should say I think the answers are easy.

How to get there of course is more difficult, but in order to end the systemic racism that we have, income inequality, the homophobia, the climate deniers, all of this, I think it all comes down to two things really-- education and civic engagement, and when you put that together, it kind of sounds like democracy.

We do not teach the real history of the United States and even of the world in our classrooms.

A teacher once asked me-- a teacher-- "Why do they have all of these Spanish names in California"... Heh.

"for cities and streets?"

I said, "Because it was part of Mexico."

Right.

Well, you're famous for saying that "We didn't cross the border.

The border crossed us."

And exactly, and we can say that we were here before the United States was the United States of America, and that applies, I think, to all of the indigenous people of the continents of North America and South America.

One of the things I love to say, especially to students when I speak to them, is to remind everybody that we are one human race.

And it started in Africa.

Exactly!

That's what I like to say.

You brought up the idea of building the self-esteem of the group that you're working for such that they come to believe that they're beautiful and worthy, and then I saw somewhere where one of your daughters said, "Brown is ugly, and poor is bad," and I wondered what your insights are over time about how to feel good about yourself in a culture that doesn't want you to.

If people understand where these types of discrimination-- what the source is, where they're coming from, then they can deal with them.

There's nothing wrong with them.

There's something wrong with society, and we have to let them know that they are worthy, that they're valued and not only that but that they have a place-- an important place in society because oftentime, people feel, "Well"-- when we talk about voting and civic engagement "Well, that's not for me.

That's for the politicians out there," but then we have to say to them "No.

You have a place.

"You are an important part of making justice happen, "contacting your schoolboard, "your city council, your supervisor, "your legislature, your congressmen.

"This is part of a responsibility that you have."

At some point, you have to believe that if you participate there will be payoff, so, like, as a woman when the Me Too thing was happening, it was--I kept thinking there are so many women who have been keeping these secrets for all these years because they think, "They're not gonna believe me anyway," and so you have to somehow sustain your belief that it will matter.

When we organize people, we break them up into groups.

"What is it that you need to get fixed in your neighborhood?"

And they write them all down, then they have the vote of priority, and then they have to make an action plan on how to make it happen, and then they do.

They do the work, and then once they see "It works, you know, "we did this, and what did we get?

"We got a neighborhood park.

We got our streets and our gutters paved."

Now this is, you might say, democracy in action because they are learning by doing.

Another thing that a great movement needs is a great rally cry, and you came up with perhaps, like, the best rally cry of the last hundred years.

[Chanting, "S se puede"] Cesar Chavez was-- you know, he did 3 fasts, the first one for nonviolence, the second one it was actually in Arizona.

When I was asking these Latino professionals "Can you come down and join us?"

And they said to me, "You can't do that "in Arizona.

Only in California.

No se puede," and my response to them was "S se puede"-- ha ha ha--"in Arizona," and that evening when I went back and we told the people at the rally that we had every night that I had responded "S se pued"--everybody jumped on their feet, and they started clapping "S se puede."

[Crowd chanting, "S se puede"] And then it came out through Barack Obama in "Yes we can."

Yes.

And then there was kind of a great moment, where you were given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he copped to the steal.

Obama: Dolores was very gracious when I told her I had stolen her slogan, uh, "S se puede," "Yes we can."

[Laughter] Uh, knowing her, I'm pleased that she let me off easy because... [Laughter] because, uh, Dolores does not play.

[Laughter] But I was so grateful for that--for that-- getting the Medal of Freedom because, number one, it came on the backs of so many of the farmworkers that, you know, were beaten, lost their homes, went to jail.

You were almost killed.

Yes.

It was a totally peaceful protest, and a police officer beat you so badly that you had internal bleeding and you had to have your spleen removed?

My ribs were broken, also, and he hit me from the back.

Physically, it was very taxing because I couldn't do anything.

So I had to wait to get well to be able to start working again.

And you need to work.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

We have so much work to do.

Mm-hmm.

Another thing that an organization needs is to be conscientious not to become the aggressor, and you and Cesar Chavez said from the jump, "No violence."

What does a movement lose when it turns to violence?

Well, the one thing you lose is support.

We knew from the very beginning when we started the Farmworkers Union that we were going to use the philosophy of nonviolence and follow the teachings of Gandhi.

Of course, Dr. King was doing the same thing in the South because we were organizing at the same time, and we said right at the very beginning, "Don't be afraid because we are not trying to do this in a violent way."

One thing that every great movement needs that you guys exemplified as well as anyone is leaders who are willing to engage in healthy debate.

Mm-hmm.

So you and Cesar Chavez argued a lot.

Yes, we did.

Ha ha ha!

Talk about that.

I think that it's the way that women think, which is different sometimes than the way that men think, and so sometimes, I would see a thing in a different way than Cesar would see it, and then we would duke it out, and sometimes, I won like boycotting grapes instead of potatoes.

Tell me about that.

Well, Cesar thought that we should boycott potatoes, you know, for this big boycott that we're going to launch, and I said to Cesar, "No.

When people think "of potatoes, they don't think of California.

They think of Idaho," and it was interesting because I was in New York City, he was back here in California, and so I said to Cesar, "This is such "an important issue that I think "I should fly back to California, and we can talk about this in person," but he didn't want to pay--he didn't want to pay for the airplane ride back to California, so he gave in on that one.

And he gave in a lot.

I mean, both of you kept returning to each other after battle.

Oh, yes.

Like, there was easy repair between you.

You know, he never went to high school, but he was very, very brilliant, very, very smart, and he always surrounded himself with people that he thought would be smarter than he.

It was great to work with him because he always had an open mind and was always willing to listen.

How much of a thing was it that you were a woman and a mother of 11?

Somebody asked Cesar, "Why do you have so many women?"

Because we had women running our clinics, we had women running field offices, you know?

He said, "It's easy.

They do the work."

OK.

So a great organization needs women, and it needs women at the table.

So the United Farmworkers had tons of women in the organization as you described, but you were the only woman in all the, like, team photos.

Mm-hmm.

Why?

That was part of my feminist awakening when I realized "Wait a minute.

"This is not right.

I'm the only woman," and then there came a time where I was having to kind of struggle with some of the male leadership in the organization.

People had reported this to me, that "They're telling Cesar that you're crazy."

Like when we fought for the amnesty bill in 1986, people kept telling Cesar "She doesn't know what she's doing," and everybody thought it was impossible, and of course, we were able to make it happen.

Mm-hmm.

By the way, by the time Cesar passed away in 1993, we had, like, I think, 4 women on the executive board, so it did happen.

And there was also another thing that it seems like you grew into, which was letting your name be associated with the work, like letting people herald your leadership, and you sort of resisted that for quite some time.

What made you change your mind?

I think I did it more for the other women, realizing that if I'm not going to stand up and take recognition for the things that I do, then other women are not going to do that either.

We have to do this.

We have to take credit for the work that we do because then we inspire other young women to do the same thing because otherwise we fall into that societal pattern that we are just as women born to accommodate men and to serve men and to serve other people and not take care of ourselves and serve ourselves, so in fact, what I say to women when I speak when you're trying to aspire for another position or an opportunity and you think, "Well, maybe I don't quite have the proper education, or I don't have the experience," just do it like the guys do-- pretend that you do and learn on the job.

So if there's one thing about "Tell Me More," that comes out in every show is that people are affecting one another, and we love putting that on display, so we have this segment called Plus One.

It's about laying bare the truth that one life leads to another, so will you tell us about your Plus One Delia?

Delia--I met her when she was a young woman.

She was the first Latina legislator in Kansas.

When she left the legislature, she got her assistant to run for her seat, and then she was elected, and she came back to Kansas and was appointed the secretary of labor for the state of Kansas.

We wanted to share with you what she had to say about you.

Delia Garcia: When I was going to college is when I learned of Dolores Huerta in one of my women's studies courses.

I was like, "Oh, my God.

She's amazing!"

But it made me very mad that I didn't learn about her in middle school or high school, and as Dolores Huerta was serving as my mentor, it made me extremely frustrated that people did not know who she was, and so I made it a point every time we went into a setting where some didn't, I would absolutely take the time "This is Dolores Huerta.

"She is a giant civil rights icon, who was woke before it was cool," and, you know, always making sure people knew who she was.

Now they have a movie, now that she's in books, Schools are named after her.

Just like there's Cesar Chavez Avenues across the country, there's now Dolores Huerta Avenues.

Kansas--we became the fourth state to have Dolores Huerta Day on April 10.

People who normally wouldn't know her, they do now in Kansas, and that's pretty cool.

My family were farmworkers both on my father's and my mother's side.

We were raised in the restaurant, Tex-Mex restaurant, so we're the oldest family-owned Mexican restaurant in the state of Kansas.

We had a railroad tracks in front of our restaurant, and we would see families jump off and hungry.

We'd feed them, and then us-- there's 5 girls in my family, and we would just sit with them and, like, start talking even though they spoke all Spanish, and we spoke broken Spanish.

We would sit with them, and then they would leave, and they would get back on the train, and we wouldn't ever see them again.

A lot of our employees couldn't afford childcare, and so my grandparents would allow them to bring their children to work, and then we would all play in the back room, and that's sort of how we began to learn Spanish was playing with the kids in the back room.

I knew I wanted to enter a life of public service when I was about a teenager.

I had attended a conference in Chicago.

It was called the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute, and I saw then Henry Cisneros, who was the mayor of San Antonio.

I saw myself, and then like, "But he's a man," and then I saw Gloria Molina, who was the first Latina elected in the state of California, and there was this book, and it talked about her story, and that was-- for the first time, I thought that it was possible for me to run for office one day, but I made that promise to myself at-- I think I was 16 years old.

In 2004, I was elected the first Latina and youngest female to the Kansas legislature.

In 2019, I became the first Latina cabinet secretary for the Department of Labor.

It was the largest attended swearing in ever in the state of Kansas.

My staff at the time, they knew I loved mariachi music, and I--you know, I can't sit in a chair when there's good music, so I just got up and then pulled Dolores' hand, and we just started dancing.

It was just such a cool moment.

[Cheering and applause] Dolores has always worked hard to make things better for the next generation.

She has taught me the power of people and organizing people, and when we organize ourselves, really when we can make good impact for Americans and for everyone for that matter.

That's what she has taught me.

That's the legacy I want to continue taking forward.

Aw.

She's awesome.

Such a awesome individual.

Yeah.

When you would go to her apartment, she had all of these young women that were coming to Washington as interns or looking for positions, and she was like a mother hen.

Mm-hmm.

So your family came to America, I think, around the same time my family came to America, which is to say a really long time ago, way before you were born, way before I was born.

Mm-hmm.

And you once said, "No matter what I did, I could never become an American."

Mm-hmm.

And then years later you were in the White House, getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Do you feel like an American now?

Well...

I think being an American is to fight for justice for everybody.

You know, when we talk-- I get--I get... Mmm.

This has never happened before.

When you think that people are discriminated in their own country for no reason except for their ethnicity or their color of their skin, that--that is so sad, especially young children that they just want to-- they just want to belong, you know, they want to be appreciated and given opportunities, and when that is taken away from them, I mean, it's a-- it's a loss for everybody.

To be an American is to continue the fight for democracy, to fight for fairness.

I remember when I was in the third grade and we were told about the Bill of Rights, and I thought, "Oh, my God.

We can do this," you know?

"We can actually not have a solider stay in our house if we don't want them to?"

And that made me feel so proud to be an American, and then as you go through life and then you get all of these discriminations that we suffer in school and, again, harassment by the police, and you see when you're fighting for justice that you have all of this opposition, and then you see it happening right now when people are fighting for the democracy of our country, but I think that we can make it happen, we can--we can make our democracy live, but it's not gonna happen unless everybody engages until we make sure that everybody realizes that they not only have a right but they have a responsibility to engage.

Some people say to me "Well, you're 91 years old.

Isn't it time that you retire?"

I say no.

As long as we know that there are more people, that we can meet with them, awaken them, make them understand that they have a role and a responsibility to make our government better that we have to keep on doing it.

You're an amazing person.

Well, thank you.

OK.

So we have a little speed round at "Tell Me More."

If your high school did superlatives, what would you have been most likely to become?

A dancer.

What's your go-to mantra for hard times?

Prayer...and music.

If I looked at your playlist, what song would be the most listened to?

Uh, "Rhapsody in Blue."

Aw.

Is there anyone you would like to apologize to?

I guess my kids.

I know that they had some rough times growing up, and, uh, there's no way that I can make it up to them, but I'm glad they survived.

When was the last time you cried?

Uh, a couple minutes ago.

Ha ha ha!

Ha ha ha!

It's a total honor to sit with you.

Thank you very much.

Well, thank you.